Best Practices for Building Digital Dashboardsfrom Dundas Data Visualization

1. Introduction

This paper defines what a digital dashboard is and is designed to help you
identify the key elements which make a digital dashboard useful. Having over three
years' experience in building and designing digital dashboards for multiple needs
and end users, Dundas Software is in the unique position of consolidating our
experience into information that will help you build a visually appealing and
well designed digital dashboard.

A digital dashboard is a collection of data visualization tools that provide
the means to quickly get an overview of how an organization or a section of an
organization is performing and the reasons behind its performance. A digital
dashboard achieves this by allowing a user to monitor important business
activities and processes that give insight into a company’s activities. One
example of a tool used by dashboards is KPIs. KPIs, discussed more in section
3.3, give the user a very accurate idea of how a unit is performing without the
user having to do deep analysis. KPIs are a fast and efficient way to deliver
information, and are an integral part of a digital dashboard. In
addition to providing quick analysis tools such as KPIs, dashboards allow the
user to analyze the root causes of performance from many different perspectives.
Once the root causes of performance are known, it is much easier for that
organization or individual to act accordingly. In short, a digital dashboard is
a tool that allows a user to quickly monitor and analyze an organization,
division, group or individual’s performance.

Digital Dashboards are used in all industries including Manufacturing,
Financial, Healthcare, Retail, Education and Energy. Each industry uses
dashboards in different ways, but the overall purpose of a dashboard stays the
same.

Figure 1: Financial Dashboard

Figure 2: Help Desk Dashboard

As you can see in Figures 1 and 2 above, the help desk dashboard looks very
different from the financial dashboard; what may be useful for one industry may
not be at all useful in another. That said every industry has some
metrics that can benefit from a dashboard format and that can potentially make a
company more efficient.

I would like to see the results from one or more industry-wide survey(s) that quantifies the use of various dashboard building applications -- especially those that take into account you best practices